Our research is concerned with the determinats and consequences of investment in child health. The central premise in that parents decide to forego some amount of current consumption of resources in order to enhance the later opportunities of their children. Established economic thory may be used to specify a model of the family investment process. Our initial formulation of such a model, though it is novel in some respects, is based on earlier contributions to the analysis of human investment and non-market productive activities of households. We treat formaly the problem of maximizin the lifetime stream of parental utility, recognizing the parents save out of current resources to provide a vector of bequeathed assets to thir children. Two of these assets are health and academic training. Econometric methods of estimation will be applied to national survey data to test theoretical insights about the determinants of health investment, the demand for certain health services, and to test hypotheses about the shifting of the distribution of health with age. Health will be operationally defined in much of our analysis by disability measures, as developed by the National Center for Health statistics. We will test the impact of the distribution of child health on the distribution of later economic opportunity using established longitudinal data.